Keeping Your Head After Losing Your Job (20 page)

One of the reasons worriers get stuck in their head is that they actually worry they will forget what they should be worried about. This is like trying to immediately recite all the telephone numbers of all the people that you know. Your mind goes on overload and you can’t remember what you should really attend to. Just because you have a thought doesn’t mean you have to think about it. You can notice it, observe it, and wave it by. “I noticed that worry, and I said, ‘See you later.’ ”

You can notice, but walk on towards your goals

Think about what I just said. You can have a thought, notice it, and walk on by—walk past the thought, leave it behind, focus on the goals that are in front of you. How can this be? How can you walk past a thought? Here’s how:

Think about these thoughts as irrelevant to your goals right now—your goals in the present moment. Let’s imagine you are at the airport and your plane doesn’t leave for two hours. You are sitting there reading a magazine. There are lots of announcements being made, people chattering, babies crying. But you say to your mind, “Hey, mind, don’t mind that. It’s not relevant. Your plane doesn’t leave for two hours. You don’t have to pay attention. It’s just background noise.”

If you are like me, it might take a few minutes to get into being able to ignore the noise. But you do it. You do it every time you travel. The same thing with these worries; they show up in your mind—“Will I ever get a job?”—and you can now say to yourself, “I’ve heard that before. There’s nothing useful for me in spending time with this thought. I have more important things to do right now—like living my life.”

You can think about the worried thought as static on a radio that you are no longer listening to. It’s just there. Who cares? No one is listening. It isn’t saying anything you need to hear. You hear it, but you don’t really pay attention.

What does your worry achieve?

Now that you have examined whether your worry will motivate you, keep you from being surprised, solve your problems, or help you be responsible, you can now answer one question about your worry “
I pay attention to my thoughts
”—that might help you set it aside more times than not: “Is your worry productive?” By “productive” I mean, does it lead to a to-do list today? Just like rumination that keeps you stuck in the past, worry keeps you stuck in your head. It doesn’t accomplish anything. Will it lead to a solution to your problem—getting a job—today? If not, it’s unproductive. And, not only is it unproductive, it’s destructive. The more you worry, the more depressed you become. The worse your concentration, the less you focus on solving real problems in real time in the here and now and the less you live your life. So I have indicated that you do have a choice—you can set it aside, put it into a compartment, write it down, make an appointment with it—wait until later for worry time. And then get on with your life in the present moment.

EXERCISE: CHALLENGE THE REASONS
FOR YOUR WORRY

Work through the list below to clarify in your own mind whether you feel that worrying is helpful to you.

•
Do you think that your worry will keep you from being surprised, solve your problems or get you motivated?

•
Is it working?

•
Or is worry trapping you with useless repetitive thoughts? Does it interfere with concentration?

•
Does it keep you trapped inside yourself? Are you unable to notice what is going on around you?

•
Do you think of your worry as a thought that you cannot escape?

•
Redirect your attention somewhere else. What happens to the worry?

•
Postpone your worry to worry time.

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Will your worry lead to any productive action? If not, set it aside.

•
Do productive and rewarding things rather than worrying about the future.

Accept uncertainty and give up control

When you are out of work, you don’t know for sure when—or if—you will get that next job. You don’t know for sure what the job will be, how much it will pay, whether you will like it, or whether you will be able to keep it. If you worry about this, you are probably having a hard time tolerating the uncertainty of being out of work and not knowing when things will work out for you.

Take a look at some of these thoughts and ask yourself if any of them seem familiar to you:

•
If I don’t know for sure how things will work out, I can bet they won’t work out well.

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Uncertainty is bad.

•
I need to know for sure how it will work out.

•
Once I have certainty, then I can relax.

•
If I worry I might be able to reduce this uncertainty.

•
If I get reassurance, I can feel more confident.

Brian was like a lot of worriers who are unemployed: “If I don’t know for sure that I will get a job, then it’s really bad. Not knowing means that anything could happen. It’s hard to live your life if you don’t know how the future will turn out.”

Uncertainty is a part of daily life

Uncertainty about the future is not the same thing as a bad outcome. You can be uncertain about the weather next week, but that doesn’t mean we are going to have a blizzard or a hurricane. You can be uncertain about whether someone driving on the highway is drunk and will lose control and kill you, but that doesn’t mean you are really unsafe. Uncertainty is neutral. It simply means you don’t know something for sure.

In fact, you accept uncertainty every day. You accept it when you drive your car, eat food in a restaurant, start a conversation, or choose to watch a film. The possible outcomes might be infinite, but you are willing to place your bets and accept some uncertainty. In fact, imagine the opposite: imagine if you knew everything for sure. It would be like Bill Murray in
Groundhog Day
, living each day with the same conversations with the same people—ultimately, boring. Repetitive sameness is a guarantee of boredom. Uncertainty just means that there is a range of possibilities.

Uncertainty is not a bad thing

Take your thought, “I need to know for sure that things will work out.” Why do you need to know for sure? If you don’t know for sure, what will happen? Can you imagine that you will have to be hospitalized with some dreaded “uncertainty disease”? The doctor in your imagination says, “I don’t know what we can do for him. He doesn’t have certainty. It looks like a hopeless case. There’s nothing we can do for him. Does he have a living will?” Nonsense! You don’t know for sure what will happen every day—you even don’t know for sure about the lives of your loved ones, or your own life. You might prefer knowing for sure about your future job—or whatever you are worried about, but your preference is not a necessity. It’s an illusion.

Why can’t you relax if you don’t know for sure? Don’t you sleep every night? How is that possible, if you don’t know for sure? Should we wake you up, if you fall asleep, and tell you to find out for sure that you will get that job? And if you don’t know, we won’t let you go back to sleep? Should we have the
uncertainty police
?

Of course, you can relax, eat, digest your food, play, have fun, learn, make love, listen to music, and do everything else. Imagine the following absurdity: “Sorry, darling, we can’t have sex tonight. Not until I know for sure that I will get a job.” This is another powerful, but nonsensical, belief that we trouble ourselves with. You can say, “Even though I don’t know for sure, I think I’ll just spend some time relaxing.” Letting go and relaxing is letting go of uncertainty. When you drop your arms and let go of uncertainty the world does not fall apart. The job will come when it comes. You have to live for now.

Worry as a guarantee of certainty

Let’s take your other two thoughts about eliminating uncertainty: “If I worry, I might be able to reduce this uncertainty. If I get reassurance, I can feel more confident.” How will worry guarantee certainty? You might think that you will be able to work it all out, maintain your confidence that everything will—
guaranteed—
work out. But you know, from experience as a worrier, that your quest for certainty only leads to more uncertainty. That’s because you can’t accept what’s possible, since anything is possible. “I could be kidnapped by men and women from outer space”—that’s possible. But eliminating uncertainty is not possible. After all, your worry is another word for
imagination
.

Since you don’t need certainty—and worry only leads to more uncertainty—you can drop your quest for certainty and accept. “I don’t know right now what the future will be, but I can try to improve my life right now.” That’s the whole message of this entire book. It’s about your time between jobs. Who knows what will turn up in the future? But during this time you can do a thousand things to make your life better. Your life right now begins when you give up—for this moment—on knowing and controlling the future.

Putting off enjoying your life until you know for sure what the future will be is like the man who decided to put off sex until retirement. Not a good plan.

Will reassurance help you?

You may think that seeking reassurance will get you that certainty that you believe you desperately need. You ask your partner or your friends, “Do you really think I’ll get a job?” They reassure you, “I believe in you. You are fantastic. It will work out. Count on it.” So now, with the reassurance, you feel better for—fifteen minutes. Then you say to yourself, “How do they know? They are just trying to make me feel better. They can’t predict the future.” Then you go back to worrying.

Reassurance is just another failed strategy to get the certainty that you don’t really need. You do need to live your life—today—in the midst of uncertainty, not knowing for sure what the future holds.

Imagine saying to an 18-year-old boy or girl, “You can’t live your life until you know how it is going to turn out.” Nonsense, once again! Living your life means that you accept whatever comes—and you live it fully, for now, in the present moment. Fully. You don’t need a curtain line to get on with the show.

EXERCISE: ACCEPTING UNCERTAINTY

When you look deeply into your fears of uncertainty you discover that there are other ways to deal with it. Work through the list below:

•
Uncertainty is neutral. Just because you don’t know for sure is no proof that it will be bad.

•
Which experiences do you accept with some uncertainty? If you are willing to accept uncertainty every day for other things, why not accept uncertainty about getting a job?

•
Why are you unwilling to accept uncertainty?

•
What would your life be like if you never accepted any uncertainty? Can you imagine living a life where you required certainty about everything?

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Can you accept uncertainty and still live your life—for now? Accepting what you don’t know can help you live a life in the present moment.

•
Why has reassurance-seeking proved so useless? Would you really believe someone if they said, ”It will all be OK”? Why not give up on reassurance?

•
Give up some control about what you cannot control—control what you can control. What are some things in your life today that you do control?

•
Putting off living for the present moment because you don’t have certainty is like wasting all of your opportunities until the final curtain. Live the life that you have now.

3: Is everything so urgent?

Karen kept thinking that she needed to know, right now, how the job search would work out. She would wake in the middle of the night, half asleep, tired, unfocused, and say, “I don’t know if I will ever get a job. I really need to know.” This sense that you need the answer right now keeps you up at night and follows you around all day, stealing your life from you. When we are anxious, we often have the sense that something is urgent. It’s like a fire alarm going off in your head. “I need the answer—IMMEDIATELY!” At times you feel that you are running around, trying to put out fires in your head. “What if I don’t get a job?” and “What if I run out of money?”—and then, you are off and running trying to answer each thought, get certainty, prove it is wrong, solve every problem. It’s like these thoughts are banging on the door, they will rush in and destroy you—unless you do something.

Doing nothing might be the best strategy.

But you can’t just “do nothing” about the future when you have these worries. You think you need the solutions right now. You think you need the answer immediately. That’s because you are telling yourself that you can’t just let it happen, let it be.

Here are some typical thoughts about time urgency that you might have.

•
If I don’t have the answer right now, then everything is going to fall apart.

•
I can’t wait to see how things will work out.

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I can’t stand not knowing about the future.

•
It’s hard for me to stay in the present moment.

You are not alone. We all tend to think that there is some urgency to finding out something that is important to us. It could be finding a job, money issues, whether your partner will leave you, or whether you will ever be happy again. Anxiety is your perception that there is a threat and your sense that there is a catastrophe about to happen. Anxiety is nature’s way of telling you, “Get the hell out immediately!” It’s nature’s way of scaring you so much that you won’t tolerate another second.

The reality is that right now you don’t have a job—and you are looking for a job. It’s not the same thing as gasping for air while the oxygen is depleted from your diving tank. Living your life daily is not the same thing as an emergency. The job can wait. But you shouldn’t have to wait to live your life. You are “in between” jobs, not living a life in limbo. Every day is your life. Live it every day.

Thoughts are only—thoughts

As strong and real and awful as this all feels, your thoughts about the future are in the same category as a tiger running towards you, or a fire in the basement. They are only thoughts. Thoughts are not going to eat you alive while the tiger uses his claws as dental floss. Thoughts are not flames jumping through the floor, consuming you and your family. Thoughts don’t kill.